Shooting Star
by RBTL
Summary: Lily can see every future in the stars, except her own. Lily Luna Potter, gen, one-shot


Staring at the stars late at night on the Astronomy Tower had always been something Lily loved. At that moment though, with her life teetering on the brink of something new, something different, it felt like the stars were even farther out of reach than they had ever been before.

"What am I doing?" Lily asked herself, fiddling with the feather in her hand. She leaned forward on the wall of the Tower, propping herself up on her elbows so she could look over the edge of the parapet. The ground lay so far below that she couldn't even see it in the dark. It was as if she was staring into the gaping maw of a bottomless pit.

"I don't know," replied Hugo, surprising her. He leaned forward too, but looked up at the sky instead of down at the ground. In her introspection, she had forgotten that her cousin was also on the Tower doing homework. "Did you find Cancer yet?"

Lily rolled her eyes. "It's January, you nitwit. You won't be able to see Cancer till the summer. It's just a trick question."

"Oh..." Hugo nodded absentmindedly and scribbled something onto a sheet of paper in front of him. He frowned down at it, and then shoved the paper aside. "Why do we have to do this?" he whined.

Lily set down her own quill and looked over at him. "You don't have to do this with me. You should be spending this time studying for your Potions and Transfiguration N.E.W.T.S. I know you only took this class so that we could spend time together."

Hugo shrugged. "What are cousins for? Besides, it's an easy extra class that'll look good on my resume."

It was a lie (who cared whether Auror recruits knew Astronomy?), but Lily loved him for it. She looked back up at the sky, her eyes tracing the shape of Capricorn. Her lessons in astrology came back to her. Capricorn was an earth sign under the planet Saturn. Divination masters claimed that Capricorns were motivated, determined, and practical and that they didn't take risks and were concerned about their careers and futures.

Lily wished she were a Capricorn. Her own Gemini nature led her to flip-flop about decisions and be utterly indecisive about anything important--like her future.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," she said suddenly, letting her thoughts flow out of her mouth without censure. "You know you want to be an Auror. Everyone else in our year is getting ready for some career or another. I'm not even taking good classes though... just Astronomy and Divination."

Hugo snorted. "And History of Magic, Arithmancy, and Charms! Those are 'good' classes."

Lily looked down at the paper in front of her and added the star Armus to her chart of Capricorn. The fact that she knew the star's name and place wouldn't help her in the real world. "What kind of job can I get with that knowledge? Divination is an imperfect magic, and Astronomy is only used by astrologers and Muggle scientists. Everyone takes History of Magic--it's the easiest N.E.W.T. to pass--and I'm not very good at Arithmancy or Charms. There isn't anything that I can do that someone else can't do better."

"Then why did you take those courses? You knew this at the beginning of the year!" Hugo tossed his quill to the side, not noticing that it fell over the edge of the tower. Lily wondered if it would reach the ground before a gust of wind blew it far away.

"It... didn't seem like a big deal then. We had such a long time until leaving, and after that, work seemed like a dream." Lily remember how she had felt as if she had nothing to worry about. Growing up was something you did in the future. It wasn't something you thought about when you were seventeen. "And now we only have a few months left."

Hugo shrugged. "So what?"

Lily felt like shrieking. "So what do I do? I need advice!"

"Do what you want to do," he said.

"And how is that going to help me?" She glanced up at the sky, located Dorsum, and then dotted it onto her chart in an effort to distract herself from the topic at hand. It didn't work. "I like doing this, Hugo. I like making star charts and finding futures in tea cups. I like learning about history because history always repeats itself through the rises and falls of nations. Arithmancy can be used to make predictions, and charms are useful for many of the things I do in my other classes. My entire life is based on looking towards the future."

Hugo grabbed her hand and held it steady, forcing her to look up at him. His bright brown eyes and dark auburn hair, both so like her own eyes and hair, were as familiar as they ever had been, but the expression he wore was not one she saw on his face often. He was grave and the look was so incongruent with the laughing boy she knew that she wanted to shake him and ask what he had done with her Hugo.

"Are you so focused on the future that you cannot see the present? Or is it just that you cannot see your own self, whether you are looking at the present, past, or future?" Hugo asked.

Lily realized then why Hugo seemed so suddenly different. He had grown up, matured, and he had left her behind. She clung to her life at school because school was for children. She wasn't ready to grow up. "Professor Firenze says that we cannot see our own futures until we are ready to face them."

"Then you aren't ready to face yours. Why?"

Hugo still grasped her hand, but she pulled it away, not ready to discuss the topic at hand.

Hugo refused to let it go so easily, even though he didn't try to grab her hand again. "Why are you afraid?"

"Because I don't want to end up like my mother!" There it was, the sordid truth. Ginny Potter had been a good mother, once, but she had been a selfish woman. Lily loved her with all her heart, but she despised her for having divorced Lily's father and left the family for another man.

Wrapping his arms around her shoulders, Hugo pulled her into a hug. "You aren't your mother, Lily, and you aren't your father. You are no one but yourself."

Tears threatened, and in the safety of her cousins arms, she let them fall. "I'm just like her. I play Quidditch and I have her hair. I've never managed to keep a steady boyfriend, and she didn't have one until she met Dad. We're both the youngest of our families and spoiled. I've caught myself acting like her, like the girl she was when she was young and like the person she is now."

"But you don't have to keep acting like her." Hugo ran his fingers through Lily's hair, a soft gesture he had down since they were children. Back then her tears had come from scrapes and bruises.

She let her tears dry up. She had cried herself out, and she was ready to move on. "I know I don't, but what if I do it anyway? What if I marry someone and then fallin love with someone else?"

Hugo's hand stalled. "You know that wasn't all her fault, don't you? Harry worked way too much after we left for school. I think... I think she felt abandoned."

Lily had heard many accusations about her father during the divorce, but none of them had come from her mother's mouth, so she hadn't believed them. Her father had spoken of her mother though. In his pain, he had talked about being abandoned. She had seen how her mother's leaving them had destroyed him. If he spent most of his time working before the divorce, he spent _all_ of his time working now.

She'd seen so much of her father's pain that she hadn't stopped to consider how her mother must have felt. How would Lily feel if the man she loved ignored her? If she had no job or no children to care for? If her life had been based on the people around her and those people had moved on?

She probably would have looked for love wherever she could find it, even if it meant cheating on her husband.

"It wasn't all because of her; was it?"

Hugo shook his head. "No. It was a lot of things that built up over time. Everyone else in the family could see it happening, but you were all too close to it."

Lily took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded. "I... can see it now."

"Your father's faults?"

She grinned. "No. My future."

Hugo tightened the hug and then drew away, leaving his hands on her shoulders as he looked at her. "I'm so glad. What do you see yourself doing?"

Lily looked up at the stars. She had been taught to read them, to pick the course of her future from the position of each star in the night sky. Right now she wasn't studying it's connections though. All she saw was a wide open sky full of stars that seemed as though, if she stretched far enough, she could touch them. "I see myself doing anything I want to do. The Department of Mysteries tends to hire students who get good scores on non-traditional N.E.W.T.s. I might try working there for a while. Or, I might study Divination more and try to find a career in that. Maybe I'll even take a few years and study Defence Against the Dark Arts or Herbology on my own and see what I can do in those fields."

Each star was like a single future. Some held happy endings, some sad. Lily couldn't be sure which future would be her own. But she knew more than the future; she knew the past. She would learn from the past, from others' mistakes, and she would move beyond them. After all, the future could not exist without the past.

"For right now though... I'm just going to live in the present."


End file.
